Lonesome
by Bassair
Summary: Octavia goes to the ground without Bellamy and everything is different. (Written for prompt #18. Lonesome from my 100 prompts table for the 100.)


When they tell her she's going to Earth, she laughs and she jumps up and down. She punches the air and she spins around.

Sixteen years under a floor, a year in holding, she never thought she'd know the true meaning of the word _freedom_, let alone experience it.

She's laughing as the ship drops and she's one of the first out of the ship, skidding through the grass and trees and giggling and twirling, inhaling the smell of the Earth and the strength of the oxygen until she's intoxicated, drunk on freedom and air that isn't filtered or repressed.

She doesn't think about it, doesn't think about the Ark, or mom, or home, or him.

* * *

She gets a soft blanket off a cute boy with big eyes and a bigger grin and she curls up at the back of the camp, watching the fire flicker and listening to the sound of the party dying down as the night falls. She's made a couple of friends: Jasper, Monty, Clarke, Finn, Wells. Finn is cute, Jasper is a dork but he's cute too, Monty is sweet, Clarke is genuine, Wells is... preachy, but she likes him too.

She looks up at the stars and smiles for a moment, because she can't wait to _tell him_, tell him all about the friends she's made, the hike she went on.

And that's when it hits her, like a ton weight to her stomach and like someone filled her heart with lead.

She's not going to _get_ to tell him. He's up there and she's down here and there's no promise that she'll ever see him again.

She might never see him again.

She might... never...

She rolls onto her side, buries her face in the blanket so no one sees her cry.

* * *

The first week is the hardest.

They lose far too many people, some to animals, some to grounders, some to _her_ (that boy that took a liking to her, that didn't want to hear her _no_, the one who took a sharpened rock to the neck).

Supplies run down.

And the _idiots_ want to take off the wristbands.

She's the first to shout at them, scream until her throat hurts that do they _want_ their families to think they're dead? Do they not want them to follow?

A boy grabs her wrist, twists, and she strikes out at him, but she's unpracticed, weaker than she'd like, and he brings her to her knees.

"No, please! He'll think I'm dead! Please!" She's not sobbing, she's _not_, she can't, she won't.

The wristband clatters to the floor in front of her face and she fights back the gag reflex that wants to join it with her small lunch.

She can almost see him on the Ark, watching the light of her life blink out.

She can almost see the light leaving his eyes.

She disappears into the forest and doesn't come back for three days.

* * *

"It's a funeral." Monty's voice draws her attention away from the lights shooting through the sky. "They killed people because of us."

She glances towards the graves, looks back up at the shooting stars streaking across the atmosphere. She can't count them, there's too many, and she wonders what the odds are of him being okay. He's everything but he's just a janitor. He's perfect but he's nothing to them.

She covers her nose and mouth with her shaking hand, holds her breath and holds her tongue.

She doesn't feel empty, so she figures he must be alive.

That's the only thing that can be true.

* * *

They're only sixty, a small gaggle of disordered teenagers stuck in a war with adults, adults with horses and spears and weapons and ways to end their life. They go their separate ways, three small clumps of twenty a piece.

She leaves on her own.

She makes her way through the trees with a spear to clear her path and she hunts and she forages. Monty finds her after a few days and they go together, heads down from their losses and not a smile between them.

She makes it as far as the beach, then she starts in another direction and when he asks what she's looking for she says she doesn't know, she's just moving. She's a nomad now. Homeless and alone.

* * *

It's not shooting stars that catch her attention, it's big clumps of Ark falling to the Earth and she holds her breath, her home dissolving before her eyes.

"What're you looking for?" Monty asks when she starts moving again.

She shrugs.

* * *

She comes across the chunk of Ark quite by chance and the sound of voices catches her by surprise. She rounds a hill, looks down over the burning remains of a section of Ark and swallows. She should keep moving, the grounders will surely come for this group before long and she can't spare the time. She's a survivor now, that's what he'd want. He'd want her to live.

She scrambles down the hill then comes to a halt at the bottom, moving towards the group. "I'm Octavia Blake!" she says, holding her hands up when someone pulls a gun. "I'm one of the one hundred. I mean you _no_ harm."

The gun is lowered and a woman steps forwards. "I... my daughter," she said. "Clarke. Clarke Griffin..."

Her stomach lurches and she shakes her head, just a tiny bit. "There..."

"She died trying to save my best friend's life," Monty said. "A hero."

Octavia looks past the woman, scans her eyes over the crowd. Man, woman. Woman. Two men. A couple of women. A small group of men. None of them have his hair, his eyes, his stance or his stature, none of them call to her heart across an empty space, devoid of life even as the living populate the area. It's dead, dead to her. A blank space.

"You can stay," the woman offers and she turns away.

"Why can't we stay?" Monty says.

"You can," she says, already walking to go back up the hill, to pick a new direction.

"Octavia!" Monty calls after her.

"Octavia?"

She comes to a halt, turns slowly, scared she's imagined it, scared it's another hallucination, scared it's a dream.

"O?"

Her eyes widen and he's standing up from behind a crate, one hand on a gun and the other shielding his eyes from the sun.

"Bell?" Her voice cracks, she hasn't said his name in so long, not to a soul, not even to herself. "Bellamy?"

He drops his gun and starts running. She drops her spear and her bag and belts across the camp. She leaps over a piece of rubble, she dodges a man with a gun like he's holding a pencil and she shoves a woman out of the way. He's doing the same, jumping pieces of Ark and looking fit to cry.

She hits him at such speed she's sure she hears one of their ribs snap but maybe it's their hearts unbreaking together. Her arms wrap around his neck and his enfold her slim waist, lifting her off the floor and into his arms and she buries her face against his shoulder, inhaling the scent she was so sure she'd never smell again. "Bellamy."

"O." He pulls her closer, digs his fingertips into her back, forearm pressing to her spine and hand to her side, and she's sure he'll never let her go, that they'll die here in this place and in this state, that the world will burn around them and neither of them will care.

"I missed you so much," she whispers.

"I knew you were alive," he breathes.

She presses closer to him, gripping handfuls of his jacket trying to climb into his skin with him. "I'd never leave you alone."

He closes his eyes, she feels his eyelashes against her cheek, and buries his face against her.

"I guess I know what you were looking for now," Monty says and it's all she can do to just laugh and pull Bellamy closer, unwilling and unable to ever let go.


End file.
